In this article, Ward Churchhill criticises Jewish
"exclusivists" role in minimising the genocides of Gypsies, Slavs and Poles
in the Holocaust, and their "exaggerated self-centeredness" of Jewish exclusivism
and its "egregious forgetting of the larger whole and all of the other
victims." Patrin recognises
that this article applies to only a handful of Jewish exclusivists. There
are many Jewish supporters of Romani rights, and other minorities, who
are
not associated, and do want to associate, with exclusivism of genocide
in the Holocaust

The costs of systematic assaults on truth and
memory by those who argue the uniqueness of Jewish victimization have often
been high for those whose suffering is correspondingly downgraded or shunted
into historical oblivion. This concerns not only the victims of the many
genocides occurring outside the framework of Nazism, but non-Jews targeted
for elimination within the Holocaust itself. Consider, for example, the
example of the Sinti and Roma peoples (Gypsies, also called "Romani"),
whom [Deborah] Lipstadt doesn't deign to accord so much as mention in her
book. Her omission is no doubt due to an across-the-board and steadfast
refusal of the Jewish scholarly, social and political establishments over
the past fifty years to even admit the Gypsies were part of the Holocaust,
a circumstance manifested most strikingly in their virtual exclusion from
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

In their zeal to prevent what they call a "dilution"
or "de-Judaization" of the Holocaust, Jewish exclusivists have habitually
employed every device known to deniers to depict the Porrajmos (as
the Holocaust is known in the Romani language; the Hebrew equivalent is
Sho’ah)
as having been something "fundamentally different" from the Holocaust itself.
The first technique has been to consistently minimize Gypsy fatalities.
Lucy Dawidowicz, for instance, when she mentions them at all, is prone
to repeating the standard mythology that, "of about one million Gypsies
in the countries that fell under German control, nearly a quarter of them
were murdered." The point being made is that, while Gypsy suffering was
no doubt "unendurable," it was proportionately far less than that of the
Jews.

Actually, as more accurate - or honest - demographic studies reveal,
the Gypsy population of German-occupied Europe likely came to somewhere
around two million in 1939. Of these, it was known at least thirty years
ago that between 500,000 and 750,000 died in camps such as Buchenwald,
Neuengamme, Bergen-Belsen, Belzec, Chehmo, Majdanek, Sobibor and Auschwitz.
More recent research shows that there have been as many as a million more
Gypsies exterminated when the tolls taken by the Einsatzgruppen, antipartisan
operations in eastern Europe and actions by Nazi satellite forces are factored
in. One reason for this ambiguity in terms of how many Gypsies died at
the hands of the Nazis, leaving aside the gross undercounting of their
initial population, is that their executioners not infrequently tallied
their dead in with the numbers of Jews killed (thus somewhat inflating
estimations of the Jewish count while diminishing that of the Sinti and
Roma). In sum, it is plain that the proportional loss of the Gypsies during
the Holocaust was at least as great as that of the Jews, and quite probably
greater.

Be that as it may, exclusivists still contend that the Gypsies stand
apart from the Holocaust because, unlike the Jews, they were "not marked
for complete annihilation." According to Richard Breitman, "The Nazis are
not known to have spoken of the Final Solution of the Polish problem or
the Gypsy problem." Or, as Yehuda Bauer had the audacity to put it in his
three-page entry on "Gypsies" in the
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust -
that's all the space the Sinti and Roma are accorded in this 2,000 page
work, the editor of which lacked the decency even to have a Gypsy write
the material filling it - "[The] fate of the Gypsies was in line with Nazi
thought as a whole; Gypsies were not Jews, and therefore there was no need
to kill them all."

Keeping in mind the likelihood that there was always
a less than perfect mesh between the rhetoric and realities of Nazi exterminations
in all cases, including that of the Jews, the distinctions drawn here bear
scrutiny. As we shall see with respect to the Poles, such claims are of
dubious validity. As concerns the Gypsies, they amount to a boldfaced lie.
This is readily evidenced by Himmler's "Decree for Basic Regulations to
Resolve the Gypsy Question as Required by the Nature of Race" of 8 December
1938, which initiated preparations for the complete extermination of the
Sinti and Roma. Shortly after this, in February 1939, a brief was circulated
by Johannes Behrendt of the Nazi Office of Racial Hygiene in which it was
stated that "all Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only
solution is elimination. The aim should be the elimination without hesitation
of this defective population." Hitler himself is reported to have verbally
ordered "the liquidation of all Jews, Gypsies and communist political functionaries
in the entire Soviet Union" as early as June 1940. A year later, Obergruppenfuehrer
Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office, followed up
by instructing his Einsatz commandos to "kill all Jews, Gypsies and mental
patients" in the conquered areas of the East.

Heydrich, who had been entrusted with the "final solution of the Jewish
question" on 31 July 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the USSR,
also included the Gypsies in his "final solution." The senior SS officer
and Chief of Police for the East, Dr. Landgraf, in Riga, informed Rosenberg's
Reich Commissioner for the East, Lohse, of the inclusion of the Gypsies
in the "final solution." Thereupon, Lohse gave the order, on 24 December
1941, that the Gypsies "should be given the same treatment as the Jews."

At about the same time, Adolf Eichmann made the recommendation that
the "Gypsy Question" be solved simultaneously with the "Jewish Question."
Himmler signed the order dispatching Germany's Sinti and Roma to Auschwitz
on 16 December 1942. The "Final Solution" of the "Gypsy Question" had begun
at virtually the same moment it can be said to have really gotten underway
for the Jews. Indeed, Gypsies were automatically subject to whatever policies
applied to Jews during the entire period of the Final Solution, pursuant
to a directive issued by Himmler on 24 December 1941 (i.e., four months
prior to the Wannsee Conference which set the full-fledged extermination
program in motion). Hence, there is no defensible way the fate of the Gypsies
can be distinguished from that of the Jews.

One of the more disgusting means by which Jewish
exclusivists have nonetheless attempted to do so, however, concerns their
verbatim regurgitation of the Nazi fable that, again contra the Jews, Gypsies
were killed en mass, not on specifically racial grounds, but because as
a group they were "asocials" (criminals). And, as if this blatantly
racist derogation weren't bad enough, the Rabbi Seymour Siegel, a former
professor of ethics at the Jewish Theological Seminary and at the time
executive director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, compounded the
affront by using the pages of the Washington Post to publicly cast doubt
as to whether Gypsies can even make a legitimate claim to comprising a
distinct people.

Predictably, Yehuda Bauer, no stranger to self-contradiction as he thrashes
about, playing all ends against the middle in his interminable effort to
"prove beyond all shadow of doubt" the uniqueness of Jewish suffering,
presumes to have the last word not once, but twice, and in his usual mutually
exclusive fashion. First, completely ignoring the 1935 Nuremberg Laws,
which defined Gypsies in precisely the same racial terms as Jews, he boldly
states that "the Gypsies were not murdered for racial reasons, but as so-called
asocials
... nor was their destruction complete." Then, barely two pages later,
he reverses field entirely, arguing that the Sinti and Romani were privileged
over Jews - and were thus separate from the "true" Holocaust - because
a tiny category of "racially safe" Gypsies were temporarily exempted from
death. Besides trying to have it both ways, it is as if this leading champion
of exclusivism were unaware of the roughly 6,000 Karait Jews who were permanently
spared in accordance with Nazism's bizarre racial logic.

To be fair, there are a few differences between
the Jewish and Gypsy experiences under Nazism. For instance, the Sinti
and Roma have a noticeably better genetic claim to being "racially distinct"
than do the Ashkenazic Jews of Europe. One upshot was that the racial classification
of Gypsies was much more stringent and rigidly adhered to than that pertaining
to Jews. By 1938, if any two of an individual's eight great-grandparents
were proven to be Gypsy "by blood," even in part, he or she was formally
categorized as such. This is twice as strict as the criteria used by the
Nazis to define Jewishness. Had the standards of "racial identity" applied
to Jews been employed with regard to the Sinti and Roma, nine-tenths of
Germany's 1939 Gypsy population would have survived the Holocaust.

All during the 1930s, while Gypsies as well as
Jews were subjected to increasingly draconian racial oppression, first
in Germany, then in Austria and Czechoslovakia, a certain amount of international
outrage was expressed in behalf of the Jews. Foreign diplomatic and business
pressure was exerted, resulting in an at least partial and transient alleviation
in Jewish circumstances, and facilitating Jewish emigration to a degree
(150,000 left by 1938). From then until the collapse of the Third Reich,
the Nazis displayed a periodic willingness to broker Jewish lives for a
variety of reasons, and diplomats like Sweden's Count Folke Bernadotte
made efforts to affect their rescue. None of this applies to the Sinti
and Roma.

The Western democracies have been harshly - and properly - criticized
for their failure to intervene more forcefully to prevent the genocide
of the Jews, even to the extent of allowing greater non-Jewish refugees
to find sanctuary within their borders. The fact is, however, that nothing
at all was done to save the Gypsies from their identical fate, and in this
connection international Jewish organizations have no better record than
do the governments of the United States, Great Britain and Canada. To the
contrary, it was arguably the Jewish organizations themselves which served
as the vanguard in obscuring what was happening to the Gypsies even as
it happened, a posture they've never abandoned. As researcher Ian Hancock
describes the results:

"It is an eerie and disheartening feeling to pick [reference books
like Encyclopedia of the Third Reich] and find the attempted genocide
of one's people written completely out of the historical record. Perhaps
worse, in the English-language translation of at least one book, that by
Lujan Dobroszycki of The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, the entire
reference to the liquidation of the Gypsy camp there (entry number 22 for
April 29 and 20, 1942, in the original work) has been deleted deliberately.
I have been told, but have not yet verified, that translations of other
works on the Holocaust have also had entries on the Roma and Sinti removed.
Furthermore, I do not want to read references to the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in the national press and learn only that it is a monument
to the plight of European Jews, as the New York Times told its readers
on December 23, 1993. I want to be able to watch epics such as Schindler's
List and learn that Gypsies were a central part of the Holocaust, too;
or other films, such as Escape from Sobibor, a Polish camp where,
according to Kommandant Franz Stangl in his memoirs, thousands of Roma
and Sinti were murdered, and not hear the word 'Gypsy' except once, and
then only as the name of somebody's dog."

Or, to take an even more poignant another example: National Public
Radio (NPR) in Washington, DC, covered extensively the fiftieth anniversary
of Auschwitz-Birkenau on 26 January 1995, but Gypsies were never once mentioned,
despite being well represented at the commemoration. In its closing report
on NPR's "Weekend Edition" on January 28, Michael Goldfarb described how
"candles were placed along the tracks that delivered Jews and Poles to
their death." But it was little wonder the Gypsies weren’t mentioned; they
were not allowed to participate in the candle ceremony. An article on the
Auschwitz commemoration that appeared in the press included a group of
Roma staring mournfully. Reading cold-shouldered: "Gypsies, whose ancestors
were to watch the ceremony from outside the compound." In a speech said
that the Jewish people "were singled out for destruction during the Holocaust."

The attitudes underlying such gestures are manifested, not merely in
Jewish exclusivism's sustained and concerted effort to expunge the Porrajmos
from history, but more concretely, through its ongoing silence concerning
the present resurgence of Nazi-like anti-Gypsyism in Europe. In 1992, the
government of the newly unified German Republic negotiated a deal in which
it paid more than a hundred million deutschmarks to Romania - notoriously
hostile to Gypsies - in exchange for that cashpoor country's acceptance
of the bulk of Germany's Sinti/Roma population (a smaller side deal is
being arranged with Poland to receive the rest). Summary deportations began
during the fall of 1993, with more than 20,000 people expelled to date,
for no other reason than that they are Gypsies. Their reception upon arrival?
A December 1993 news story sums it up very well:

An orgy of mob lynching and house-burning with police collaboration
has turned into something more sinister for Romania’s hated Gypsies: the
beginnings of a nationwide campaign of terror launched by groups modeling
themselves on the Ku Klux Klan. "We are many, and very determined. We will
skin the Gypsies soon. We will take their eyeballs out, smash their teeth,
and cut off their noses. The first will be hanged."

The German government had every reason to know this would be the
case well before it began deportations. The depth and virulence of Romania's
anti-Gypsy sentiment was hardly an historical mystery. Moreover, a leader
of the Romanian fascist movement, directly descended from the Arrow Cross
formations which avidly embraced Nazi racial policies during World War
II, had openly announced what would happen nearly six months earlier:

"Our war against the Gypsies will start in the fall. Until then, preparations
will be made to obtain arms; first we are going to acquire chemical sprays.
We will not spare minors either."

No accurate count of how many Gypsies have
been killed, tortured, maimed or otherwise physically abused in Romania
is presently available (unconfirmed reports run into the hundreds). What
is known is that there has been a veritable news blackout on the topic,
and that reaction from those elements of the Jewish establishment which
profess to serve as the "world's conscience" on such matters has been tepid
at best. No serious protest arose from that quarter, not even when Romani
leaders, hoping to avoid what they knew was in store, took a large delegation
of their people during the spring of 1993 to seek sanctuary in the Neuenganune
concentration camp where their fathers and mothers were murdered a generation
earlier. Certainly, no Jewish human rights activists came forth to stand
with them as an act of solidarity.

As usual, it was Yehuda Bauer who produced what was perhaps the best
articulation of exclusivist sentiment on the matter. As early as 1990,
he was publicly complaining that such desperate attempts by Gypsies to
end the condition of invisibility he himself had been so instrumental in
imposing upon them was coming into "competition" with the kind of undeviating
focus on "radical anti-Semitism" he'd spent his life trying to engender.
No better illustration of what the distinguished Princeton historian of
the Holocaust Amo J. Mayer has described as the "exaggerated self-centeredness"
of Jewish exclusivism and its "egregious forgetting of the larger whole
and all of the other victims" can be imagined.
Recovering the Holocaust

There should be no need to go into such detail
in rejoining exclusivist denials of the genocides perpetrated against Slavic
peoples within the overall framework of the Holocaust. However, a tracing
of the general contours seems appropriate, beginning with the familiar
assertion that "they were treated differently from the Jews, and none were
marked out for total annihilation." As Lucy Dawidowicz puts it, "It has
been said that the Germans ... planned to exterminate the Poles and Russians
on racial grounds since, according to Hitler's racial doctrine, Slavs were
believed to be subhumans (Untermenschen). But no evidence exists
that a plan to murder the Slavs was ever contemplated or developed."

There is both a grain of truth and a bucketful of falsity imbedded in
these statements. In other words, it is true that Slavs were not named
in the Endlosung (Final Solution) sketched out for Gypsies and Jews during
the 1942 Wannsee Conference. This clearly suggests that the last two groups
were given a certain priority in terms of the completion of their "special
handling," but it is not at all to say that Slavs weren't "marked out"
to suffer essentially the same fate in the end. Presumably, the final phases
of the Nazis' anti-Slavic campaigns would have gotten underway once those
directed against the much smaller Jewish and Gypsy populations had been
wrapped up. In any event, the idea that "no plan [for Slavic extermination]
was ever contemplated or developed" is quite simply false.

As is abundantly documented, the Hitlerian vision
of lebensraumpolitik - the conquest of vast expanses of Slavic territory
in eastern Europe for "resettlement" by a tremendously enlarged Germanic
population - entailed a carefully calculated policy of eliminating resident
Slavs. In the USSR alone, this planned "depopulation" was expressly designed
to reduce those within the intended area of German colonization from about
75 million to no more than thirty million. This sizable "residue" was to
be maintained for an unspecified period to serve as an expendable slave
labor pool to build the infrastructure required to support what the nazis
deemed "Aryan" living standards. The 45 million human beings constituting
the difference between the existing population and its projected diminishment
were to be dispensed with through a combination of massive expulsion -
"drive them eastward" - and a variety of killing programs.

Plans for more westerly Slavic peoples like the Poles, Slovenes and
Serbs were even worse (or at any rate set on a faster track). As early
as Mein Kampf, Hitler unambiguously announced that they, like the
Jews, were to be entirely exterminated. For the Poles at least, this was
to be accomplished in a series of stages which seems likely to have been
intended as a model for similarly phased eradication of the Ukrainians
and other peoples to the east: immediately upon conquest, the Poles would
be "decapitated" (i.e., their social, political and intellectual leadership
would be annihilated, en toto); second, the mass of the population
would be physically relocated in whatever configuration best served the
interests of the German economy; third, the Poles would be placed on starvation
rations and worked to death. Whether or not there would have been a fourth
and "final" phase a la Auschwitz is irrelevant, since the results,
both practical and intended, are identical.

Unlike the Gypsies and Jews, the Slavs were mostly organized in a way
lending itself to military resistance. Consequently, planning for their
decimation necessarily factored in attrition through military confrontations.
Insofar as German methods in the East, in sharp contrast to those employed
against non-Slavic western opponents, always devolved upon the concept
of "a war of annihilation," the extraordinarily high death rates suffered
by Soviet prisoners of war are not really separable from the extermination
plan as a whole. Similarly, according to SS GruppenfWuer Eric von dern
Bach-Zelewski, who commanded antipartisan operations in eastern Europe,
the manner in which such warfare was waged was consciously aimed not just
at suppressing guerrilla activities, but to help "achieve Himmler's goal
of reducing the Slavic population to 30 million."

Available evidence suggests that the principle
victims in the partisan-Nazi confrontations were the civilian population.
Thus, for example, when 9,902 partisans were killed or executed between
August and November 1942, at the same time the Germans executed 14,257
civilians whom they suspected of aiding the partisans. A Polish scholar,
Ryszard Torzecki, views the mass extermination of civilian population as
the greatest drama of the Ukraine during World War II. According to him
there were 250 sites of mass extermination of Ukrainian people - together
with detention camps in which thousands of people perished. In a great
many cases, mass murder was related to partisan warfare. H. Kuhnrich estimated
that as a result of the antipartisan war 5,909,225 people were killed.
Since the Ukraine was the center of partisan activity, it was there that
the greatest losses occurred. According to Kuhnrich some 4.5 million people,
both fighters and civilians, lost their lives in the Ukraine, as did 1,409,225
in Byelorussia.

Certainly, these slaughtered civilians should be included in the total
of those taken by Nazi extermination policies, not labeled as "war deaths."
And, if the standard practice of lumping the deaths of Jewish partisan
fighters into the total of six million Jews claimed by the Holocaust were
applied equally to Slavs, then plainly the body count of partisans should
be as well. And again, since the Jews killed by Bach-Zelewski's SS men
during the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising are rightly included among the Jewish
victims of the Holocaust, so too should the masses of civilian Slavs liquidated
during the German seizures of cities like Kiev, Kharkov, Sebastopol and
Mink be tallied. When the totals of those deliberately worked to death,
who died of exposure during the process of being driven eastward under
any and all conditions, who were intentionally starved to death, and who
perished in epidemics which spread like wildfire because of a calculated
Nazi policy of denying vaccines, the true dimensions of the genocide of
the Slavs begins to emerge.

Between 1939 and 1945, Poland, the first Slavic nation to fall to the
Germans, suffered 6,028,000 nonmilitary deaths (three million of the Polish
dead were Jews, and another 200,000 or so Gypsies, so the Slavic reduction
would come to about fourteen percent). Virtually every member of the Polish
intelligentsia was murdered. In Yugoslavia, some 1.2 million civilians,
or nine percent of the population, were killed between 1941 and 1945 (this
is aside from approximately 300,000 military casualties suffered by the
Yugoslavs). Impacts in other non-Soviet areas of eastern Europe - e.g.,
Slovakia and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia - were less substantial,
although nonetheless severe.

The USSR suffered by far the highest number of
fatalities. By 10 May 1943, the Germans had taken 5,405,616 Soviet military
prisoners; of these, around 3.5 million were starved, frozen, shot, gassed,
hanged, killed by unchecked epidemic or simply worked to death. Another
five million people were deported to Germany as slave laborers - 2.2 million
from the Ukraine alone - where an estimated three million died as a result
of the intentionally abysmal conditions to which they were subjected. By
the time the Germans were finally driven completely out of the Ukraine
in 1944, its prewar population of almost 42 million had been reduced to
27.4 million, a difference of 14.5 million. Of these, at least seven million
were dead. Overall, the Soviet Union lost, at a minimum, eleven million
civilians to Nazi extermination measures. The real total may run as high
as fifteen million, to which must be added the 3.5 million exterminated
prisoners of war, and perhaps as many as a million troops who were simply
executed by Wehrmacht and Waffen SS units rather than being taken prisoner
in the first place. A gross estimate of the results of Nazi genocide against
the Slavs thus comes to somewhere between 15.5 and 19.5 million in the
USSR, between 19.7 and 23.9 million when the Poles, Slovenes, Serbs and
others are added in. As Simon Weisenthal, himself a survivor of Auschwitz,
long ago observed, "the Holocaust was not only a matter of the killing
of six million Jews. It involved the killing of eleven million people,
six million of whom were Jews." Weisenthal spoke on the basis of what was
then the best available evidence. Today, some fifty years later, the only
correction to be made to his statement lies in the fact that we now know
his estimate of eleven million was far too low. The true human costs of
Nazi genocide came to 26 million or more, six million of whom were Jews,
a million or more of whom were Gypsies, and the rest mostly Slavs. Only
with these facts clearly in mind can we say have apprehended the full scope
of the Holocaust, and that we have thereby positioned ourselves to begin
to appreciate its real implications.
Uncovering the Hidden Holocausts

University of Hawaii historian David Stannard has
summed up the means by which exclusivists attempt to avert such understanding.
"Uniqueness advocates begin by defining genocide (or the Holocaust or the
Sho’ah) in terms of what they already believe to be experiences undergone
only by Jews. After much laborious research it is then 'discovered' - mirabile
dictu - that the Jewish experience was unique. If, however, critics
point out after a time that those experiences are not in fact unique, other
allegedly unique experiences are invented and proclaimed. If not numbers
killed, how about percentage of population destroyed? If not efficiency
or method of killing, how about perpetrator intentionality?" It is as Stephen
Jay Gould has said of another group of intellectual charlatans, "They began
with conclusions, peered through their facts, and came back in a circle
to the same conclusions." As Stannard has concluded, this is not scholarship,
it is sophistry.

To put it another way, as Gould does, it is "advocacy masquerading as
objectivity." The connection being made is important insofar as Gould is
describing the academic edifice of nineteenth century scientific racism
which provided the foundation for the very Nazi racial theories under which
the Jews of the Holocaust suffered and died. Given that Deborah Lipstadt,
Yehuda Bauer, Steven Katz, Lucy Dawidowicz and other exclusivists are of
a people which has recently experienced genocide, the natural inclination
is to align with them against those like Paul Rassinier, Austin App, Robert
Faurisson and Arthur Butz who would absolve the perpetrators. Yet, one
cannot.

One cannot, because it is no better for Lipstadt to "neglect" to mention
that the Gypsies were subjected to the same mode of extermination as the
Jews, or for Dawidowicz and Bauer to contrive arguments that they weren't,
than it is for Rassinier to deliberately minimized the number of Jewish
victims of Nazism, or for Butz to deny the Holocaust altogether. One cannot,
because there is nothing more redeeming about Katz's smug dismissal of
the applicability of the term "genocide" to any group other than his own
than there is about Robert Faurisson's contention that no Jews were ever
gassed. One cannot, because Yehuda Bauer's The Holocaust in Historical
Perspective, Steven Katz's The Holocaust in Historical Context
and Lucy Dawidowiez's The Holocaust and the Historians are really
only variations of Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
written in reverse. All of them, equally, are conscious exercises in the
destruction of truth and memory.

Deniers of the Holocaust must, of course, be confronted,
exposed for what they are, and driven into the permanent oblivion they
so richly deserve. But so too must those who choose to deny holocausts
more generally, and who shape their work accordingly. Deborah Lipstadt
rightly expresses outrage and concern that Holocaust deniers like Bradley
Smith have begun to make inroads on college campuses during the 1990s.
She remains absolutely silent, however, about the implications of the fact
that she and scores of other Holocaust deniers have held professorial positions
for decades, increasingly branding anyone challenging their manipulations
of logic and evidence an "anti-Semite" or a "neo-Nazi," and frequently
positioning themselves to determine who is hired and tenured in the bargain.
The situation is little different in principle than if, in the converse,
members of the Institute for Historical Review were similarly ensconced
(which they are not, and, with the exceptions of App and Harry Elmer Barnes
early on, never have been).

Viewed on balance, then, the Holocaust deniers of Jewish exclusivism
represent a proportionately greater and more insidious threat to understanding
than do the Holocaust deniers of the IHR variety. This is all the more
true insofar as the mythology peddled by exclusivists, unlike that put
forth by a Faurisson or a Richard Verrall, dovetails perfectly with the
long institutionalized denials of genocides in their own histories put
forth by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, France, Turkey,
Indonesia and many others. Indeed, Lucy Dawidowicz has sweepingly accused
those suggesting that the U.S. transatlantic slave trade was genocidal
- or, by extension, that U.S. extermination campaigns against American
Indians were the same - not only of anti-Semitism but of "a vicious anti-Americanism."
She is equally straightforward in her efforts to contain what Robert Jay
Lifton and Robert Markusen have called "the genocidal mentality" within
the framework of uniquely German characteristics. "Steven Katz and James
Axtell, the reigning dean of American historical apologism, have taken
to virtually regurgitating one another's distortive polemics without attribution."

Plainly, if we are to recover the meaning of the Holocaust in all its
dimensions, according it the respect to which it is surely due and finding
within it the explanatory power it can surely yield, it is vital that we
confront, expose and dismiss these "dogmatists who seek to reify and sacralize
it, converting it into a shallow and sanctimonious parody of its own significance."
Only in this way can we hope arrive at the "universality" called for by
Michael Berenbaum, executive director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
when he suggested that the Holocaust can become a symbolic orienting event
in human history that can prevent recurrence. Undoubtedly, this was what
the executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in
Jerusalem, Israel Charny, had in mind when he denounced "the leaders and
'high priests' of different cultures who insist on the uniqueness, primacy,
superiority, or greater significance of the specific genocide of their
people," elsewhere adding that:

"I object very strongly to the efforts to name the genocide of any
one people as the single, ultimate event, or as the most important event
against which all other tragedies of genocidal mass-death are to be tested
and found wanting. For me, the passion to exclude this or that mass killing
from the universe of genocide, as well as the intense competition to establish
the exclusive 'superiority' or unique form of any one genocide, ends up
creating a fetishistic atmosphere in which the masses of bodies that are
not to be qualified for the definition of genocide are dumped into a conceptual
black hole, where they are forgotten."

In restoring the Gypsies and Slavic peoples
to the Holocaust itself, where they've always belonged, we not only exhume
them from the black hole into which they've been dumped in their millions
by Jewish exclusivism and neo-Nazism alike, we establish ourselves both
methodologically and psychologically to remember other things as well.
Not only was the Armenian holocaust a "true" genocide, the marked lack
of response to it by the Western democracies was used by Adolf Hitler to
reassure his cabinet that there would be no undue consequences if Germany
were to perpetrate its own genocide(s). Not only were Stalin's policies
in the Ukrainians a genuine holocaust, the methods by which it was carried
out were surely incorporated into Germany's General Plan just a few years
later. Not only was the Spanish policy of conscripting entire native populations
into forced labor throughout the Caribbean as well as much of South and
Central America holocaustal, it served as a prototype for Nazi policies
in eastern Europe. Not only were U.S. "clearing" operations directed against
the indigenous peoples of North America genocidal in every sense, they
unquestionably served as a conceptual/practical mooring to which the whole
Hitlerian rendering of lebensraumpolitik was tied.

In every instance, the particularities of these prior genocides - each
of them unique unto themselves - serves to inform our understanding of
the Holocaust. Reciprocally, the actualities of the Holocaust serve to
illuminate the nature of these earlier holocausts. No less does the procedure
apply to the manner in which we approach genocides occurring since 1945,
those in Katanga, Biafra, Bangladesh, Indochina, Paraguay, Guatemala, Indonesia,
Rwanda, Bosnia and on and on. Our task is - must be - to fit all the various
pieces together in such a way as to obtain at last a comprehension of the
whole. There is no other means available to us. We must truly "think of
the unthinkable," seriously and without proprietary interest, if ever we
are to put an end to the "human cancer" which has spread increasingly throughout
our collective organism over the past five centuries. To this end, denial
in any form is anathema.